ILIAS-Blog

Even if e-learning means more than file sharing, the file object in ILIAS is for sure the most used object type to publish and share learning content. Therefore it is obvious to support ILIAS users with a good working tool for uploading, sharing and providing files in the system. Thanks to a Swiss project at PH Zurich it is now possible to offer an improved and user-friendly file handling in ILIAS 4.4. Some of these features are already available in the test installation.

With 4.4 it will be much easier and quicker to upload several files at once from your personal computer into ILIAS. When creating a new file object ILIAS offers a drag&drop field where you put in the selected files from your local file system. This can be done for multiple files at once. When starting the upload process you will also see a progress bar that indicates which files are still uploaded and which are already in ILIAS.

Once the files are uploaded to ILIAS you will now have more possibilities to provide the selected files to your users. ILIAS 4.4 offers you a direct link to download a file. There is no need any more to visit the Info page first and then hit the download button. This download link starts the download process immediately - if you have appropriate permissions for reading this file.

And compared to former versions you now can define which versions of a file are offered for download - and which not. Especially when using ILIAS for collaboration and knowledge management processes this is a very helpful feature as it gives you full control over the access to the different file versions within one file object.

A very nice feature of the upcoming major release of ILIAS will be the file preview (see screenshot below). You do not need to download the file any more to see if it is the right one you are looking for. Just move the mouse over the title to get a preview layer of the document.

You find more information about these features in the ILIAS feature wiki, category File Object. All mentioned features above were implemented by Stefan Born at Pädagogische Hochschule Zürich and funded by Switch AAA Project "Dateihandling in ILIAS".